


Through the Leaves of the Night

by toastpiercer



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Backstory, Childhood, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Mommy Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-23
Updated: 2016-09-23
Packaged: 2018-08-15 16:26:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8063590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toastpiercer/pseuds/toastpiercer
Summary: One of Gustavo’s first memories was of holding his mother’s hair back while she got sick. The smell of red wine and black coffee and stomach acid mingled with the dying sweetness of the gardenias on her dressing table, and the omnipresent, heavy musk of her perfume.





	

One of Gustavo’s first memories was of holding his mother’s hair back while she got sick. The smell of red wine and black coffee and stomach acid mingled with the dying sweetness of the gardenias on her dressing table, and the omnipresent, heavy musk of her perfume.

  
“Mami’s so sorry, gordito,” his mother sobbed when she could gasp out words. She squeezed his hand, groped around to stroke his head, desperate to restore some shred of her maternal dignity, to comfort her child for having to comfort her. “She’s so, so sorry. This is the last time, I promise, I promise.”

  
It wasn’t, of course, and Gustavo knew even then that it wouldn’t be. He had never seen his father lay so much as his little finger on his mother, but he knew that, somehow, all the same, she lived with his hands wrapped tight around her neck.

  
—

  
Gustavo remembers her differently, too, holding him on her lap and reading him a story, one about a little boy born in the stars who had fallen to earth. He remembers her dark eyes shining with real laughter. He remembers her singing sweetly in a thin, soft voice, times when there wasn’t stale wine on her breath. He remembers her taking him from the nanny and carrying him to bed, the clean, cool smell of her neck.

  
—

  
Years later, when Gustavo had become a man and then another man, he would watch Lydia Rodarte-Quayle and her young daughter together. Foster children were to Quayle what the hospital was to him. The broad outline of her story was readily available, in Forbes and almost every other interview she’d ever given. More than that, Gus could guess —rather well, he thought— at what some of the finer, hidden details might be.

  
He would wonder if, had their lives turned out differently, they might have spoken to one another candidly. Perhaps they would even have been friends. He might have visited her at her home, and after the child had gone to bed, they would open a bottle of wine and talk. Perhaps there would have been things Quayle would be more inclined to talk about after a glass or two, certainly never more than three. There might have been subtle things, secret things, that they could have understood about one another without saying.

  
—

  
When he was a child, Gustavo sometimes creeped into his mother’s room after an especially bad nightmare, and found her still awake, wrapped in a caftan and sitting in the wide window at the front of the house, open to the summer night’s air. His mother would be drinking, as usual, and crying to herself, the sound of her tears silent under Maria Callas’ warbling on the record player.

  
_“…non feci mai male ad anima vita…”_

  
With her long, brown fingers, Gustavo’s mother would catch the tears welling in her wide eyes, one by one. The ones she missed would roll down the fine high cheekbones she’d passed on to him, shining moonlight-bright on her skin.

  
On one of those nights, something pulled at Gustavo for the first time, something sharp in his chest, the closest thing he’d ever felt to real hunger. Something told him then that if somehow, he could get his own money, maybe his own army, he would be able take her away from his father and the world of military anthems and sharp-pressed uniforms and state dinners. Then, he thought, he could bring her somewhere else, to one of the beautiful places she loved: Paris, Milan, her quiet hometown in Coquimbo. He could make sure that she was always safe, and always, always happy, and she would never even need to look at another bottle of wine again.

  
—

  
These were foolish dreams, of course. An eight-year-old’s stupid, impossible dreams. Fantasies as ridiculous as a talking fox who wants to be tamed, or roses that can think and feel and fall in love. When Gustavo was older, he would learn better.

  
—

  
His mother did teach him, though. Everything he knows, as all mothers do. How to smile at someone you hate. How to take vengeance every chance you get, even in little ways, even when you’re backed into a corner. How to hold yourself still and unyielding, like a rock in a storm, so that whatever horrors may come will never, ever break you.

**Author's Note:**

> "Only do not forget, if I wake up crying  
> It's only because in my dream I'm a lost child  
> Hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands." 
> 
> ~Pablo Neruda, "Sonnet XXI"


End file.
